In recent years, foreign language learning has been proposed as a possible cognitive intervention for older adults. However, the brain network and cognitive functions underlying FLL has remained largely unconfirmed in older adults. In particular, older and younger adults have markedly different cognitive profile—while older adults tend to exhibit decline in most cognitive domains, their semantic memory usually remains intact. As such, older adults may engage the semantic functions to a larger extent than the other cognitive functions traditionally considered the (...) most important. Using anatomical measurements and a cognitive test battery, the present study examined this hypothesis in twenty cognitively normal older adults, who participated in a two-month Italian learning programme. Results showed that the immediate learning success and long-term retention of Italian vocabularies were most consistently predicted by the anatomical measures of the left pars orbitalis and left caudal middle frontal cortex, which are implicated in semantic and episodic memory functions. Convergent evidence was also found based on the pattern of cognitive associations. Our results are consistent with a prominent role of semantic and episodic memory functions in vocabulary learning in older learners. (shrink)

Due to the economic globalization which is characterized with business scandals, scholars and practitioners are increasingly engaged with the implementation of codes of ethics as a regulatory mechanism for stimulating ethical behaviours within an organization. The aim of this study is to examine various organizational practices regarding the effective implementation of codes of ethics within construction contracting companies. Views on ethics management in construction organizations together with the recommendations for improvement were gleaned through 19 semi-structured interviews, involving construction practitioners from (...) various construction companies in Hong Kong. The findings suggested some practices for effective implementation of codes of ethics in order to diffuse ethical behaviours in an organizational setting which include; introduction of effective reward schemes, arrangement of ethics training for employees, and leadership responsiveness to reported wrongdoings. Since most of the construction companies in Hong Kong have codes of ethics, emphasis is made on the practical implementation of codes within the organizations. Hence, implications were drawn from the recommended measures to guide construction companies and policy makers. (shrink)

Beyond the adoption of codes of ethics for moderating behaviours within an organization, there is need for change in the dynamism of ethics management in construction companies. This change is necessitated due to inability of ethical codes to function by its mere existence without proper integration into organization’s web. This study aims at identifying supporting factors for code integration and the resultant factors as well as the relationship between the two sets of factors. Questionnaire survey was used to gather data (...) from practitioners in Hong Kong construction organizations. Using Relative Importance Index and correlation analysis, findings revealed that commitment of managing director to ethics, communicating codes with employees and managers acting as role models ranked highest among the input factors, whereas building public trust, enhanced organization’s reputation and increased protection against lawsuits ranked highest among the resultant factors. There were great numbers of significant positive correlations between the input factors and the resultant factors with the exception of consistence of codes with international standards and increased company’s profitability which exhibited negative correlation. The highest significant positive correlation coefficient existed between training about the importance of ethics and subjective and inconsistent management standards are minimized which points to the importance of ethics training in establishing ethical standards. The findings can help construction practitioners to improve organizational ethical standard and be more result-focused in managing ethics. (shrink)

Several researchers have identified codes of ethics as tools that stimulate positive ethical behavior by shaping the organisational decision-making process, but few have considered the information needed for code implementation. Beyond being a legal and moral responsibility, ethical behavior needs to become an organisational priority, which requires an alignment process that integrates employee behavior with the organisation’s ethical standards. This paper discusses processes for the responsible implementation of CoEs based on an extensive review of the literature. The internationally recognized European (...) Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Model is proposed as a suitable framework for assessing an organisation’s ethical performance, including CoE embeddedness. The findings presented herein have both practical and research implications. They will encourage construction practitioners to shift their attention from ethical policies to possible enablers of CoE implementation and serve as a foundation for further research on ethical performance evaluation using the EFQM model. This is the first paper to discuss the model’s use in the context of ethics in construction practice. (shrink)

Customers complain because they want to be treated fairly by the company when a service failure occurs. The role of perceived complaint justice and its relation to customer satisfaction has been discussed and researched. However, a static view is mostly adopted in previous literature. We argue that satisfaction is cumulative and both prior satisfaction and post-recovery satisfaction should be looked at in relation to complaint justice in the context of service recovery. This study attempts to fill the gap by investigating (...) the mediating role of justice in the relationship between prior satisfaction and post-recovery satisfaction (both with the recovery and with the organization) and examining the mediating role of post-recovery satisfaction in the relationship between the dimensions of justice and customer retention. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 200 customers that had service failure experience at Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong. Justice dimensions (distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice) were found to fully mediate the relationship between prior satisfaction and satisfaction with recovery. All dimensions, except the interactional justice, were also found to be partial mediators in the relationship between prior satisfaction and post-recovery satisfaction with organization. Findings also revealed the mediating roles of two post-recovery satisfaction variables in transferring the justice dimensions into behavioral intention, with the two variables playing almost opposite roles. Discussion and recommendations are provided for future development and improvement in building long-term relationship with customers. (shrink)

Bestseller LET'S NOT LOVE by Kim Yong Ok in a Q&A dialogue style with a young man on various subjects of life in Korean society. Kim who is an artist, educator and philosopher uncovers his philosophical perspectives on adversities and challenges Koreans are facing from who will win in the coming presidential election to many social phenomenon and thoroughly overturns common wisdom and expectation. Rich in philosophy, ideology, history, language... In Korean. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by (...) Tsai Fong Books, Inc. (shrink)

It is with no feigned modesty that I acknowledge, as a limited and superficial student of philosophy, the honour you have done me by your invitation to deliver the Manson Lecture. But if the honour is undeserved, it is by fortuitous circumstance the more appreciated. Dr. Manson was a family doctor in Warrington, Lancs., with whom I was privileged to have close professional associations. He was a man of many parts who regarded the isolation of medicine from philosophy (...) as an unintelligible and lamentable phenomenon of our time. He wished to see philosophy restored to its earlier and rightful basic rôle in medical education. He recognized that medicine and, indeed, the cognate basic sciences were occupying themselves almost exclusively with so rapidly accelerating an accumulation of facts, that little time remained for reflection and interpretation, and for pondering on the place of medicine in, and its contribution to, the general corpus of knowledge. And he was especially interested in the topic which I have chosen for this commemorative lecture, for he recognized, and translated into practice, the dictum that “No disease is wholly physical, and none wholly mental.” He saw in his patient the “whole” man, not a summation of such isolates as body, mind, environment, and family. (shrink)

I Am grateful for the honour of being invited to give the second Manson Lecture. Dr. Manson believed that the study of sick people leads into the widest fields of thought, but that increasing specialization within medicine diverts the doctor from seeing man and his nature whole: the chief question seems to be , “whether medicine is in the bondship of practice, whether it is a skilled art, or whether it can emerge to give its own contribution to (...) abstract thought and philosophy.” Indeed, pleading with doctors to join this Institute of Philosophy, he declared that medicine should be the most philosophic of the professions. In this he was reviving an ancient claim: the arguments for it have lately been restated with much Aristotelian piety by Scott Buchanan. Now here I find myself in a difficulty at the outset: I am to speak of the relationship between philosophy and medicine, at a lecture founded by a passionate believer in their conjunction, yet I am engaged in a particular branch of medicine which was for longer than any other preoccupied with philosophy and dependent on it, but had so little profit from its fidelity that it reckons progress from the time when it struggled away from this allegiance. Psychiatry has not been able to refrain since then from many a backward glance at the older philosophy she once swore by, and she has been much influenced by the philosophies of later times: she has—doubtless in punishment for her defection—become entangled now and then in bad, unrecognized philosophy of her own making. She has, at all events, never achieved more than a temporary indifference to philosophic thought. (shrink)

All activities which are taking place in the Cosmos also exist in a human body in subtle micro-scale. Plexuses centers in a human body are the most mysterious kinds of energies. The six-center plexus system is the path of the Kundalini shakti, the primordial cosmic energy of a person. Each plexus has its own propensities (vibrating words/dimensions/vritti) and an acoustic root. These plexuses control some cluster of words of sounds and corresponding physical organs in human body. The 50 main propensities (...) of the human’s unit mind are expressed through the vibration-expression of these plexuses. These vibrations cause hormones to secrete from the corresponding glands of the human’s body. These plexuses can play very important roles in curing the diseases. According to the Theory of Nikola Tesla’s 369, there are all together 1 to 9 digital root numbers exist. All other higher or lower numbers are the combination of those digital root numbers. This statement seems quite true when we compare it with Theory of Absolutivity. If 3, 6, 9 numbers are arranged together it makes a letter Ohm (AUM) which represents actually a Sagun Bramh/Nikola Tesla’s 369 triangle which is a part of NirgunBramh having higher dimensions. Number zero is the NirgunBramh (having all the qualities but in dormant form) which does not possess any quality in action. Number 3, 6, 9 forming as an equilateral triangle of static, mutative and sentient forces representing the Black-hole which is a part of Sagun Bramh projecting Himself as a Visible World through Big-bang along with forming five basic elements such as Ethereal, Areal, Fire, Liquid and Solid. According to the biological science, life emerged in this planet from matter about four billion years ago in the form of DNA that carried the software for the development of billion of species on the way to its final destination in humans. These facts also fully support the above hypothesis of universe formations. (shrink)

I argue for the conditions that eco-sabotage (sabotage involving the protection of animals or the environment) must meet to be a morally permissible form of activism in a liberal democracy. I illustrate my case with Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya’s oil pipeline destruction, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s whale hunt sabotage, and the Valve Turners’ pipeline shut-off, climate necessity-defense. My primary contention is that just as it is permissible to destroy an attacker’s weapon in self- or other-defense, it is permissible (...) to engage in some forms of eco-sabotage. Taking inspiration from just war theory, I use the conditions of just cause, reasonable chance of success, proportionality, necessity, and discrimination to both conceptualize eco-sabotage as defense and illustrate the justificatory burden the eco-saboteur must meet. Often eco-sabotage is doubly pro-tanto wrong because it is illegal and involves property destruction. Overcoming these hurdles is particularly difficult because in seemingly bypassing democratic means of dispute resolution, the eco-saboteur seemingly coerces the other members of society by forcing idiosyncratic views upon them. Non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense of animal rights has mixed results regarding the democratic objection just described. I argue that anthropocentric eco-sabotage, grounded in defense of human rights, has the best chance of overcoming this objection, provided a persuasive case can be made for its reasonable chance of success. Passing a reasonable chance of success also causes problems for non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in species defense, while non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense against animal suffering has a lighter justificatory burden. (shrink)

The multiverse hypothesis is one of the leading proposed explanations of cosmic fine-tuning for life. One common objection to the multiverse hypothesis is that, even if it were true, it would not explain why this universe, our universe, is fine-tuned for life. To think it would so explain is allegedly to commit “the inverse gambler's fallacy.” This paper presents what the inverse gambler's fallacy is supposed to be, then surveys the discussion of it in the philosophical literature of the last (...) 35 years. (shrink)

Advancement of modern agricultural biotechnology has brought various potential benefits to humankind, but at the same time ethical concerns regarding some applications such as genetically modified foods have been raised among the public. Several questions are being posed; should they utilize such applications to improve quality of their life, or should they refrain in order to save themselves from any associated risk? What are the ethical principles that can be applied to assess these applications? By using GMF as a case (...) study, this paper discusses possible answers to these questions from Islamic perspective. Such answers are based on the understanding of the Islamic concept of maslahah and mafsadah as well as the Islamic principles of priority. There is no specific GMF that has been declared as unlawful by Muslim scholars thus far. Nevertheless, they generally state that any GMF that contains unlawful substance is prohibited in Islam. Such statement can be understood since Islam puts highest priority to preserve shari’ah which prescribes the lawful and unlawful things in human life. Priorities have also been given to preserve human health and environment therefore any GMF that may inflict harm on both entities is also considered as unlawful. (shrink)

In a recent article, I argued that Ploug and Holm’s ‘meta-consent’ proposal should be rejected for biobank governance. This was because, although meta-consent is permissible, it is both burdensome and ethically omissible. There is no ethical reason why funders should undertake the additional costs. Ploug and Holm have sought to respond to these arguments. Here, it is noted that not only do they fail to adequately refuse the case against meta-consent, they fail to even engage with the arguments, either misunderstanding (...) them or ignoring them. In their response, Ploug and Holm unwittingly provide the basis of an even stronger case against meta-consent. They argue that broad consent has a built in tendency to expire, while also holding that broad consent should be one of the options available in meta-consent. Meta-consent thus ends up being more like dynamic consent, but, arguably, even more burdensome and costly. (shrink)

American philosopher Zhu Dien • Ba Tele that for granted with a series of related discussion, and while there are of a fixed body of the material. Bate Le read de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" that this is not Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" women's issues or situations in the application. De Beauvoir said that consciousness exists in which a person's body, and in the cultural vein, the participation in the formation of a person's gender. Ba Tele think understanding the philosophy of (...) Sartre's body, in many ways we can improve the appreciation of Beauvoir thought, and concluded that she is a thinker with originality. (shrink)

Harnessing the empowering ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to read the human condition of modern existence through a sociological lens, this book confronts the realities of how modern social structures, ideologies, and utopianisms affect one's ability to purpose existence with self-authored meaning.

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation. Drawing on the (...) work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance. (shrink)

On mind and body relationship; with reference to India.

The notion of conditional entropy is extended to noncomposite systems. The \-deformed entropic inequalities, which usually are associated with correlations of the subsystem degrees of freedom in bipartite systems, are found for the noncomposite systems. New entropic inequalities for quantum tomograms of qudit states including the single qudit states are obtained. The Araki–Lieb inequality is found for systems without subsystems.

The target article elaborates upon an extant theoretical framework, “Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning.” We raise three major concerns: (1) There is limited discussion of cross-cultural universality and variation; (2) overgeneralization of overimitation and omission of other social learning types; and (3) selective imitation in infants and toddlers is not discussed.

Conduct of Muslim women in Turkey in the age of globelization; 20th century.

The problem of rationalizing denominators for two types of fractions is discussed in the paper. By using the theory and algorithms of Gröbner bases, we first introduce a method to rationalize the denominators of fractions with square root and cube root, and then, for the denominators with higher radical of the general form, the problem of rationalizing denominators is converted into the related problem of finding the minimal polynomials. Some interesting results and an executable algorithm for rationalizing the denominator of (...) these type fractions are presented. Furthermore, an example is also established to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. (shrink)

Festschrift honoring Maṇḍana Miśra, b. 1929, Sanskrit philosopher; comprises articles chiefly on Mīmāṃsā school in Hindu philosophy.

Modern art history practice often treats Buddhist icons or ritual objects as unique objects, focusing on their originality and uniqueness. This text investigates how the paradoxical Buddhist doctrine of ‘the one and the many’ was translated into visual language through manipulation of the relationship between copies and the original. It analyses the different tactics and strategies formulated around given socio-historical frameworks to visualise the notion of infinity, and ultimately the structure of the universe, and suggests that multiple copies of a (...) single design were more potent a vehicle than single objects in expressing ideas related to the Buddhist metaphysics. (shrink)

Learning a deep structure representation for complex information networks is a vital research area, and assessing the quality of stereoscopic images or videos is challenging due to complex 3D quality factors. In this paper, we explore how to extract effective features to enhance the prediction accuracy of perceptual quality assessment. Inspired by the structure representation of the human visual system and the machine learning technique, we propose a no-reference quality assessment scheme for stereoscopic images. More specifically, the statistical features of (...) the gradient magnitude and Laplacian of Gaussian responses are extracted to form binocular quality-predictive features. After feature extraction, these features of distorted stereoscopic image and its human perceptual score are used to construct a statistical regression model with the machine learning technique. Experimental results on the benchmark databases show that the proposed model generates image quality prediction well correlated with the human visual perception and delivers highly competitive performance with the typical and representative methods. The proposed scheme can be further applied to the real-world applications on video broadcasting and 3D multimedia industry. (shrink)

When it is suggested that the fine‐tuning of the universe for life provides evidence for a cosmic designer, the multiple‐universe hypothesis is often presented as an alternative. Some philosophers object that the multiple‐universe hypothesis fails to explain why this universe is fine‐tuned for life. We suggest the “This Universe” objection is no better than the “This Planet” objection. We also fault proponents of the “This Universe” objection for presupposing that we could not have existed in any other universe and that (...) the values of the free parameters of the Universe could have been different. Lastly, we reflect on why fine‐tuning for life needs explaining. (shrink)

In part one, I identify the core logical structure of the precautionary principle and distinguish it from the various key concepts that appear in the many different formulations of the principle. I survey these concepts and suggest a program of further conceptual analysis. In part two, I examine a particular version of the precautionary principle dubbed “the catastrophe principle” and criticize it in light of its similarities to the principle at work in Pascal’s Wager. I conclude with some suggestions for (...) advocates of the precautionary principle who wish their formulation to avoid the pitfalls confronting the catastrophe principle. (shrink)

In recent analytic philosophy of religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience. In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston, and Jerome Gellman among others. I explain the argument's intuitive force and why the stock objections to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound Swinburne's approach and his application of (...) the Principle of Credulity to religious experience. Then I critically examine four major objections to Swinburne. I conclude that the argument from religious experiences is not likely to be conclusive but it should not be dismissed either. (shrink)

Informed consent is a central topic in contemporary biomedical ethics. Yet attempts to set defensible and feasible standards for consenting have led to persistent difficulties. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill set debates about informed consent in medicine and research in a fresh light. They show why informed consent cannot be fully specific or fully explicit, and why more specific consent is not always ethically better. They argue that consent needs distinctive communicative transactions, by (...) which other obligations, prohibitions, and rights can be waived or set aside in controlled and specific ways. Their book offers a coherent, wide-ranging and practical account of the role of consent in biomedicine which will be valuable to readers working in a range of areas in bioethics, medicine and law. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 67-69.